Ringtones, copyrights, and more.

Posted on March 26, 2009

Allright, so  i got this cool new cellphone that can play songs as ringtones.  No,  i didn’t go out and buy it (who has money for that kind of thing right now anyway?  not me…)  i got it for free.   One of my clients from my design business ordered a bunch and it turned out he didn’t need as many as he thought he would so he gave me one of the extras as a thank-you because he was happy with work I’d done.  So that’s cool, fancy new tech without the fancy bill.  fun times.  Thing is, when I go to add songs it turns out I can’t use my own mp3′s as ringtones, i can only use special songs that  i have to pay to download.

Now it just so happens that, thanks to the digital distribution my band is currently getting, it is in fact possible to download Beltaine’s Fire songs and use them as ringtones, but in order to do so I have to pay an additional $10 a month in a subscription fee for a service that I’m not otherwise interested in.  All this is done in the name of “protecting the artist” and preventing “piracy”.

Now, granted, it is an additional revenue stream for artists and with the industry the way it is maybe I shouldn’t complain, it’s hard enough to get paid as a musician already and I’d be lying if i said I wouldn’t like to make a living doing what I love.   Still, I can’t help feeling like there’s something fundamentally wrong when I can’t add a song that I wrote about my partner to my phone to use as a ringtone for when she calls me without paying some distant faceless corporation for the privilege.

It’s not like it’s the end of the world or even particularly signficant, but it struck me as a perfect example of how copyright law is twisted to serve the interests of corporations by forcibly inserting a middle  man in between the artist and the listener.

I hate the Radio

Posted on March 24, 2009

So I made a habit a while back of setting my alarm clock to the most vile corporate drivel i could find in order to force myself to get out of bed and turn it off.  Previously i’d had it set to classical music (because there are no radio stations that play independent, conscious hip hop music or folk or trip hip or any interesting electronica or pretty much anything else I’m actually interested in listening too) but as it turned out classical was just too damn peaceful and I kept sleeping right through my alarm.

At first the strategy worked pretty well but this morning it backfired on me, big-time, because i woke up to a Jonas Brothers song.  Something about time travel and how the singer went to the year three thousand and “your great great great granddaughter, is doing fine.”  I swear they must have repeated that same banal chorus 16-20 times, it was practically the entire song.  And now it’s stuck in my head.  Fuck.  double fuck. It’s times like this I can see the attraction of religion because if i believed in a god at least I could derive some small sadistic pleasure by imagining them slowly burning in hell.

It’s not up there with the wholesale rape of the planet and the wanton destruction of everything beautiful, but for the morning at least crappy plastic disneypop is ranking pretty high up there on my list of reasons to hate capitalism and the ruling corporateocracy.

Despite the Riots….

Posted on March 21, 2009

Check this out:

Last week, I wrote an article defending free speech for everyone – and in response there have been riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who published the article.

Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states have successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.

I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists – of all stripes – have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths. They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead, they must be “respected” – by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of “adulterous” women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these are “religious” issues, and it is “offensive” to talk about them.

- Johann Hari: Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote.  Read the full article here

The author touches on some deep issues in the article (which goes on quite a bit longer and which I highly recomend that ya’ll go read) but I think the best is that Freedom of Speech must be unrestricted in order to function and that the antidote to people who use it to say stupid and ridiculous things is more freedom of speech from other people who oppose them – not government or religious censorship in the name of “public decency” or any such garbage.  Public Decency laws have nothing to do with decency and everything to do with the people who control the State using morality as an excuse to silence those who threaten the status quo.